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American family saga for the post modern world

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`At a party in a bedsit just off Gower Street a young woman stood alone at a window, her elbows pinned to her sides in an attempt to hide the dark flowers of perspiration blossoming at the armholes of her dress.' The Believers opens with a prologue set in London in 1962 - just a year before sexual intercourse started according to Larkin - and sex happens on a first date within the first fifteen pages of the wonderfully written prologue which juxtaposes the sad provincialism of Audrey's parents with the possibilities of moving to New York with American Joel Litvinoff. With Joel she imagines being a comrade 'against injustice' and `sharing the passion and action of their time.' The prologue is a fantastic opener; the writing is funny and sharp and there is a real sense of excitement and possibility. Heller's wit and clear eyed observation is evident in the opening pages - another woman joins her at the window as she is watching Joel and starts to speak to her about him. `Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversations of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.' Audrey moves away when the women points out that Litvinoff is a Jew. `There was a time when she would have lingered to hear what amusing or sinister characteristic the woman attributed to the man's Jewishness........and then, when she had let the incriminating words be spoken, she would have gently informed the woman that she was Jewish herself. But she had tired of that part game. Embarrassing the prejudices of your country men was never quite as gratifying as you thought it would be; the countrymen somehow never embarrassed enough.' The rest of the novel takes place forty years later in a post 9/11 Manhattan and start very promisingly. Joel is still fighting the good fight, still married to Audrey, and some tension is introduced with some other family members. And then at the end of the first chapter Joel is struck down and spends the rest of the novel in a coma as his dysfunctional family circles around him. Heller quotes Gramsci at the start of the novel `The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned' and it's true that each of her characters explores their illusion and their belief systems in the course of the novel. For Audrey it's about being on the radical left as a comrade of Joel, for her adopted son Lenny it's about drugs - their daughter Rosa has abandoned Cuba and is exploring Orthodox Judaism whilst the good but ugly daughter Karla stops being a good wife. They are not very sympathetic characters but then neither was Barbara in Notes on a Scandal and yet that was mesmerising if less well written. So, it's good subject matter and very well written but somehow, for me, it never delivered on the promise of that prologue and opening chapter - perhaps because Audrey was unrecognisable as the young girl in the window.

Disappointment

Customer Rating:

Like most reviewers, I bought this book with high expectations after my delight with Notes on a Scandal, but unlike most reviewers, I was disappointed. I felt I was being lectured about Judaism, about radical left-wing politics, about drug addicts, about social do-gooders. Audrey is just too obnoxious. No one has a laugh anywhere, no one enjoys life at any time. This is not to say that Zoe Heller does not demonstrate impressive insight into human nature, it's just that the sum of these three different story-lines left me underwhelmed. I have passed on my copy to a book-swap.

Missing something..........

Customer Rating:

I loved Notes on a Scandal and was really looking forward to this book. I like Zoe Hellers writing style alot, it reads effortlessly without being lazy. I loved the opening chapter, and the premise while unoriginal was not a bad one. What stopped me loving the book was the characterisation. Audrey the main character was a monster and I never feel we really understood her, well I didn't. I found both daughters a bit one dimensional, I never really empathised with either of them but particularly Rosa. I love books that examine family interaction and how it forms the basis for how people develop and form. Karla was the most heart warming character I thought. It was an OK read, but just lacked something for me.

Impossible to care...

Customer Rating:

I loved Zoe Heller's last books but this one is packed with the most unsympathetic bunch of characters I've ever come across in one book. I didn't care about any of them, and the matriarch who dominates the book is so relentlessly unpleasant that I was absolutely indifferent to her fate. Her appalling selfish cruelty towards all her children was implausible and unquestioned by any of her family or friends. Her children were all equally unattractive and, despite their grim family background, I felt no sympathy for their fates. None of them seemed to learn anything about themselves and none of them seemed truly affected by the death of their father. There were no moving or telling encounters between mother and children, just a lot of vicious unprovoked ranting. A big disappointment.

The Believers

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Zoe Heller's third novel, The Believers, is a delicious satire on modern social mores. Her previous two novels, the sorely unrecognised farce Everything You Know and the thrillingly malicious Notes on a Scandal - which was made into a film - as well as Heller's many entertaining newspaper and magazine columns, have all demonstrated her abilities as a sharp, witty observer of ugly human behaviour. The Believers is rich with more of Heller's wickedly acute apercus. Set in 2002, the story follows events in the lives of the self consciously liberal Audrey and Joel Litvinoff and their children one tumultuous year. Heller's novel is littered with despicable characters that she paints deftly with simple but devastating brush strokes, yet they never slip into self parody; they are utterly believable. The reader alternately snickers and shudders, sniggers and goosebumps at them. But we've all probably met people like this, posturing, mildy hypocritical wealthy activists, joyless pursuers of union rights whose concern for the workers doesn't translate into kindness on an individual level, people who are intolerant of all but their own foibles. There are also sympathetic characters here, real, complex personalities with faults and strengths, and their human weaknesses and flashes of humanity shine through. Heller is as mordantly funny and beadily insightful an observer of society as Oscar Wilde was in his day. With a simple phrase she can wreak devastation on a character, whether it's an observation of a cliched turn of phrase used to death by a lumpen person or a hilariously evil description of a self important character's demeanor during sex. It is the highest art form to use language so succinctly, to make gaspingly perceptive observations so languorously, with so little ostensible effort. In this, Heller is in the same league as William Boyd - her prose is a joy to read. She out-bitches other vindictive female writers like Julie Burchill but does so without Burchill's contradictions and off-putting self love; she is a master of the understated put-down. The Believers is a wry, riotously funny novel. Why it didn't make the 2008 Booker long or shortlist is a mystery - perhaps a snobbish perception of absence of gravitas, of a failure to deal with larger themes than human faults, family and relationships. But this is a myopic view: The Believers tackles in its way the contradictions inherent in many great themes - organized religion, social good, the value of a political conscience and its contribution to making a person objectively 'good'. Read it. *****